The objective of this project is to appropriately model and account for the influence of spatial and temporal affects underlying population processes and its relationship with emerging and persistent social inequality. The project is motivated by differential distributions of population and literacy in historic Puerto Rico accompanying political and economic shifts, and the general lack of statistical attention to spatial and temporal effects that, when unaccounted, distort statistical estimates and neglect crucial substantive elements of social and population processes that would otherwise inform theories and analyses of societal development. The main hypotheses I will examine are that, as societies develop, population size is unevenly distributed according to local economic base and its correspondence with national expanding industry, that the distribution of inequality is related to economic base, but this relationship is conditioned by population. The findings from this project will provide researchers with reliable estimates of socioeconomic differentials across stages of societal development and methodological means through which additional questions involving both spatial and temporal dimensions might be addressed. [unreadable] [unreadable]